Currently being shot in Bray, Co Wicklow, Intermission is that rare thing - an Irish film. Louise East paid a visit to the set.
The lounge of the Bray Head Inn couldn't be anything other than a movie set right now. All the hall-of-mirrors tricks are there - like the grimy windows built out of plywood and glass, just two metres inside the near-identical real windows. The assistant director frantically stops the crew from smoking in a bar full of piped-in cigarette smoke. A gouger in a tracksuit, with a furious black eye and a ritzy line in gold rings, hands his pastel coffee mug to a girl in 7-inch platform boots, saying apologetically, "would you mind holding on to this? I promised I wouldn't lose it." The gouger is actor Colin Farrell, last seen by most people persecuting Tom Cruise in Steven Spielberg's Minority Report.
Yet for all its unmistakable movie qualities, this particular production, Intermission, is one project that owes a lot more to the stage than it does to Hollywood.
Once you start to unravel the story behind this rare Irish production, with its A-list Irish cast from Farrell, Colm Meaney and Cillian Murphy, to Ger Ryan, Owen Roe, Pat Laffan and Michael McElhatton, all threads seem to lead to the theatre.
Ask producer Alan Moloney of Parallel Films how he got involved and he'll tell you that Neil Jordan saw a production of The Crucible in The Abbey a few years ago and told its director, John Crowley, to get in touch if he ever wanted to do a film. Jordan and his production partner, Steven Woolley, brought Moloney in on the deal during the filming of the Beckett Film Project. Actor Colm Meaney describes working with Crowley on Juno and the Paycock last year, at London's Donmar Warehouse where Crowley, a Cork man, is associate director. Crowley in turn talks about seeing Howie the Rookie, a play by Intermission's script director, Mark O'Rowe, in London's Bush Theatre.
It's been a long time coming together, this production. Filming was due to start last autumn and again in March, but it didn't get the green-light until after this year's Cannes Film Festival.
"It took a long time to get funding," agrees Moloney, who is on set, while Jordan and Woolley are at the Toronto Film Festival for the premiere of their film, The Good Thief.
"It's an unusual script and the marketing people had a real difficulty with it because it doesn't fall into any one genre."
With over 50 speaking parts, Intermission is a big movie, and it crucially lacks the one strong hero that makes it a star vehicle. Yet in another way, O'Rowe's script was the best weapon in their arsenal. Despite hectic schedules and uncertain funding, Farrell, Meaney, Murphy and Kelly Macdonald (Trainspotting, Gosford Park) all committed to the project over a year ago and remained committed, which Moloney describes as "enormously beneficial" when it came to funding.
For Farrell, who can now command huge fees, such as the rumoured $50 million he got for his forthcoming film Daredevil, choosing such a low-budget movie is almost an extravagance. "In a way, it's easy for me because I've done well financially. I have agents who work to get me the kind of money I get and that's great. But for me, it's the same job whether in America or here. I'm an actor and when I read a script that I really like, I'll do it. I couldn't give a f**k whether it's a blockbuster or not."
Structurally, Intermission is compared variously to Magnolia and Short Cuts (Moloney), to Gosford Park (Meaney) and even to The Commitments (Farrell). It's a blackly-comical ensemble piece, made up of several overlapping narratives taking place around a criminal heist gone wrong. Each actor is keen to describe his character.
"He's a total scumbag," says Farrell of his character, Lehiff. "A petty criminal who's got to a stage in his life where he thinks he might like to go straight, settle down in a little house, but make no mistake, he'd still head-butt a woman if he thought she had a fiver and he wanted it."
"John is fairly representative of a young Irish male," sighs Cillian Murphy of his character. "He won't talk at all about what's going on in his head."
Colm Meaney literally flexes his fingers with relish. "Jerry is a detective who takes law enforcement very seriously, very personally. Yet at the same time he's very into Celtic mysticism. You can be quite sure he's read Anam Cara and he's very into his music, or what he calls 'his sounds'. We wanted Enya, but she was having none of it, so we've had to invent the bands he's into." Meaney reels off several, suitably daft names.
Intermission has one of film's best-loved plot devices: the one last heist before retirement (Ocean's Eleven, Heist, Unforgiven, The Killer). It features that most well-represented Irish sub-group on film (the Dublin criminal), yet both cast and crew are insistent that Intermission is something new.
"It's a big step forward for Irish film-making," says Alan Moloney, while Colin Farrell is characteristically colourful: "I think a lot of Irish films, like I don't know, Frankie Starlight or something, flirt with Irishness, whereas this film is so f**king Irish."
DIRECTOR John Crowley admits he was determined that his first feature film would be an Irish one. Flooded with film scripts after his Donmar Warehouse colleague Sam Mendes hit the Hollywood big-time with American Beauty and fellow theatre director Stephen Daldry followed with Billy Elliot, Crowley says he disliked them all. Instead, he decided to develop a script by Dublin's Mark O'Rowe; "It was John's first feature film and I suppose I could have tried to get the film made with a director who had done more films," says O'Rowe, who admits he read the rules of screen-writing, then ignored the lot. "But when it came down to it, John just got it from the beginning, and that's essential."
'I'm Irish and I wanted to make an Irish film," says Crowley, who claims he always wanted to be a film-maker but fell into acting at UCC because it was easier. "Or at least, I wanted to make a non-American film. A lot of Irish films, in their style and technique, seem to want to be American films; I didn't want that." To that end, he hired a Polish cinematographer, Ryszard Lenczewski, whose work on The Last Resort (shot, like Intermission, on Super 16 film), had impressed him. "I guessed, and it's been borne out in the last week, that Lenczewski would work really fast. His is a very documentary style, using long lens and hand-held cameras to take in the action. This script has a large number of characters, and I really wanted that energy and emotion."
Although Crowley acknowledges that any multi-layered ensemble film owes a debt to Robert Altman, he would be happier if the end result is comparable to Alejandro González Iñárritu's Amores Perros; "I really want that kind of roughness and clarity."
At the end of the first week of filming, Crowley is keeping to schedule "right to the very minute," says Moloney in disbelief. "He knows exactly what he wants. I must ask him how many times he's read the script," muses Colin Farrell. Comparing him to Steven Spielberg, he says Minority Report was this huge film and there was so much going on around you, these tableaus and special effects, that Stephen pretty much let you get on with it . . . John gives each actor time and he's really into discussing your character's back story. He's much more hands-on."
Another Hollywood veteran, Colm Meaney, also reckons that Crowley's theatre background makes him a particularly valuable asset for this film.
"This script particularly needs a good actor's director, because it's so performance-driven. It's almost old-fashioned - it's not relying on special effects or camera tricks and one of John's greatest attributes as a director is his ability to get great performances from actors."
Crowley himself points out that the production delays have allowed him to go over the script with a fine tooth comb.
"People are saying to me, you know exactly what you want and in a way I do. I know exactly what I want to realise in terms of performance. But I'm very aware that you have to improvise to capture the essence of that performance on the day. You're constantly thinking on your feet."
Once it hits the screens next year, producer Alan Moloney is confident that Intermission will overcome the traditional response to ensemble movies: loved by the critics, slow at the box office. "What I've consistently maintained is that if you have this quality of cast and something as funny as this, it's not going to matter if the film is . . . well . . . complex is too strong a word, but layered. It's very, very funny."